If you're looking for signs that things may be getting better in the realm of IT investment, the past few weeks provided me with a number of positive antecedents that back up IDC's Predictions for 2010.

In late February, I was at an event in New York City sponsored by a leading NetApp reseller.  CIOs from a number of leading finance, entertainment, life sciences, and manufacturing enterprises were trying to come to grips with what the "cloud" meant for their businesses.  Aside from the usual, and quite legitimate, concerns about security and sound IT governance, the most interesting theme was that none of them talked about "cloud" as a cost savings option (a major theme in the past year).  Their interest in cloud focused on accelerating business expansion and introducing new services for employees and customers.

Yesterday, I returned from a event put on by Pillar Data Systems for its customers.  After a year of cancellations and conversion to "virtual" events, it is heartening to see that IT suppliers again recognize the importance of talking directly with a large pool of customers and, more important, are making it easier for customers to talk face to face with each other.  Aggressive consolidation and virtualization were on the top of everyone's agenda, but so was new service activities.  For some, this translated into major expansions in the use of business intelligence and data analytics.  For others, digitizing and intelligently archiving intellectual property assets were the top concerns and priorities.

I noticed one other recurring theme at both events.  Lots of the CIOs and IT executives wanted to know two things:  When is Apple going to ship the iPad and what are people going to do with it?

A number of my colleagues at IDC have provided interesting and insightful analysis on the product and its challenges.  What I found most interesting in my conversations was the belief Apple is concurrently engaging in some mega data center construction at scales similar to companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft.  The obvious conclusion here is that the iPad you'll be checking out at the Apple store on April 3 (hopefully) is only a part of the product.  The rest, and in many cases the most important parts, will be back in these data centers.

My next question for folks in this conversation was what were they doing to prepare their data centers (and all the applications in them) for supporting employees, partners, and customers on smartphones, iPads, or Netbooks.  Then the conversations got interesting.

To a person, we all agreed that "mobilizing" applications and services (not just mobilizing web sites) is likely to be the most fundamental "business-centric" initiative for their IT organizations in the next five years:

• Financial institutions of all sizes want to add mobile banking to their portfolios
• Media/entertainment companies want to leverage location capabilities to further refine audience analysis and advertising algorithms
• Health care organizations want to enable self monitoring and continuous data collection for patients
• IDC wants to make it possible for me to write and post research and  blogs like this one from the road rather than having to fire up my laptop (my own personal request)

Figuring out how to do this cost effectively and in a way that doesn't completely obliterate sound IT governance practices, was a less satisfying conversation.  Some of the larger companies already have plans in place and are looking for partners in the hosting, SaaS, and mobile services industries to help.  Smaller companies are worried about the same issues, but they don't yet see any good options that meet their needs.  Their IT systems, storage, and application software partners aren't yet engaging to address the issue.

I think the time has come for this to change:

• How do you think extending services to the mobile world will change your business in the next five years?
• Are you planning to leverage mobile devices (and their location capabilities) for data collection purposes?
• How do you plan to deal with the data privacy and information management issues this raises?

I'm looking for your help in getting ahead of the curve when it comes to IT governance and the mobile world.